Alan Hopkins

Alan Hopkins, who has died aged 86, was for seven years in the 1960s
Conservative MP for Bristol North-East, campaigning against the threat to
grammar schools from the city's Labour council; though well to the Right of
his party on the economy, he was Parliamentary private secretary at the
Treasury to Sir Edward Boyle, that most liberal of Tories.

Outside Parliament, Hopkins was a barrister and businessman, and came to national attention through his involvement with two notorious child murder cases.

In 1960 he protested to the Home Secretary, RA Butler, that John Straffen had been given a special cell at Horfield prison. Straffen had been charged in 1951 with murdering two children in Bath, been found unfit to plead and sent to Broadmoor.

Straffen escaped, and during four hours’ liberty murdered a five-year-old girl; he was sentenced to death but reprieved and imprisoned at Horfield. After a residents’ protest he was transferred to Cardiff, but was sent back after two years, when Hopkins took up the case. Butler assured him it would be impossible for Straffen to escape; he remained behind bars until his death in 2007.

In 1964 Hopkins intervened in the “Babes in the Wood” case: the unsolved murder of a young brother and sister, Royston and June Sheasby, in 1957. A Home Office psychiatrist, Dr A Hyatt Williams, told a professional conference that a prisoner had confessed to the murders while under medical treatment, and had then died.

The children’s parents had been told unofficially that the suspect had died, but the police were still treating the case as open. Hopkins joined the father in appealing to Butler’s successor Henry Brooke for the killer to be named, but secrecy was maintained.

Alan Cripps Nind Hopkins was born on October 27 1926, the son of Sir Richard Hopkins, head of the Civil Service during the Second World War. Educated at Winchester and King’s College, Cambridge, he was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1948.

After further study at Yale, Hopkins joined a law firm in New York, where he met his first wife, the daughter of a Texan oil and lumber magnate. Returning to Britain three years later, he went into merchant banking, spending a year with Lazard’s before joining a subsidiary of Hambro’s.

Before going to Yale he had served briefly on Marylebone council and the London County Council’s education committee. On his return , in 1959 he won Bristol North-East — he was one of the last MPs newly-elected as a National Liberal and Conservative. In 1960 he became Boyle’s PPS, serving until Boyle became Education Secretary two years later. Being a Treasury PPS did not stop him joining a protest in the 1922 Committee against Selwyn Lloyd’s failure to hold down government spending.

An anti-Marketeer who “played truant” when British membership was first voted on in 1961, Hopkins was kept busy on local issues. At a public inquiry he supported residents’ objections to the M4 being built close to their homes .

Just before the 1964 election Labour published its plan for Bristol to go comprehensive, abolishing six grammar schools and withdrawing free places from seven direct grant schools. The resulting furore helped Hopkins hold his seat by 1,211 votes.

With Labour in power, Hopkins promised protesting parents he would fight the plan every inch of the way. He appealed in the Commons for grammar schools and comprehensives to coexist, with a new form of selection to replace a discredited 11-plus. Labour’s Education Secretary Michael Stewart told him reorganisation on comprehensive lines was now national policy; Hopkins responded with a protest motion signed by 70 Tories.

In 1966 Hopkins lost his seat to Labour by 3,972 votes. He sold his six-bedroomed home in Knightsbridge for £22,000 to the young David Frost, and moved to Great Shefford House, near Newbury; he later lived in Switzerland.

Hopkins had kept up his business interests while in the Commons, in 1962 becoming a director of Charles Clore’s Investment Registry; he later joined the boards of Elpitiya Rubber and Parkinson Cowan. From 1972 to 1983 he chaired Wellman Engineering, makers of foundry equipment.

Alan Hopkins married first, in 1954, Margaret Cameron, with whom he had a son. They divorced in 1962, when he married, secondly, Venetia Weld-Forester, daughter of Sir Edward Wills of the tobacco family; they had twin sons.